Statues Without Plinths

A Collection of Plinthless Statues, Starting in the Caribbean and Moving East to the Shore of the China Sea

Introduction

There was a time when effigies of ‘the great and the good’ stood on plinths so pigeons could perch on their heads and the rest of us could look up to them. The ultimate was Admiral Nelson whose plinth – or column - is 52m high. The figure itself is over 5m, but for the sculptor (Edward Hodges Bailey) it must be galling to have worked so hard on something that very few people ever see properly.

Nelson's column, Trafalgar Square, London in November sunshine

I don’t know where or when the fashion started but I think I first saw statues of normal sized people standing on the pavement (or, in this case, sidewalk) in Tacoma, Washington (the western US state, not the eastern city) in 1998. The next summer, in the south of France, we found them in several towns; whichever side it started the idea had already jumped the Atlantic. Over the last twenty years it has spread to most corners of the Earth.

I like these statues. Most (but not all) are light hearted, and I appreciate being able to look a statue in the eye. So here is a selection of writers and musicians, ordinary people and eccentrics, cats, dogs and more. My (arbitrary) rules for inclusion accepts a pedestal up to knee height, but the figure must to be roughly life size. I also feel free to bend my rules whenever I want.

Cuba

No doubt I took some photos in Tacoma in 1998, but prints are so much easier to loose than digital photos, so I will start in the Caribbean, in Cuba to be precise.

Havana
(visited March 2020)

When not physically looking up at a sculpture, there is no pressure to metaphorically look up to the person portrayed, you just have to enjoy their company.

El Caballero de Paris outside San Francisco de Asís

El Caballero de Paris (real name José María López Lledín) stands outside the former Church and Convent of St Francis of Assisi. Brought to Havana from Spain by his parents aged 11, he had mental problems in later life and lived on the street while believing he was a French aristocrat. Despite his loose grasp of reality, his charm and education made him a well-known and popular figure. He died in 1985 aged 85. Such statues, appreciate being touched and Lynne earned good luck, as many had done before, by stroking his beard.

Ireland

Dublin
(visited 25 June 2014 - Joyce and Famine Memorial)
24 June 2014 - Oscar Wilde)

The Prick with the Stick (more formally, James Joyce) is arguably the foremost writer in a city of writers, though he spent most of his adult life on the continent of Europe. I am overlooking his plinth as it is (just) below knee high.

Lynne and James Joyce, Earl Street, Dublin

His statue is one of four with rhyming nicknames. The Queer with the Lear is Oscar Wilde who sits on a slab of quartz (not a plinth) in Merrion Square Park opposite the house of his father, an eminent Dublin surgeon.

Lynne and Oscar, Merrion Square Park, Dublin

We missed The Tart with the Cart (Molly Malone) as she had been temporarily removed to allow for the construction of a tramway, and The Floozie in the Jacuzzi (Anna Livia Plurabelle, James Joyce’s personification of the River Liffey) due to my poor research.

The Famine Memorial stands beside the River Liffey. Most of the statues in this post are light-hearted, but not this one. The group of ragged people and their equally thin dog stand on the quay, almost staggering to the point of embarkation. Dublin has plenty of public art, much of it very good, but this is at another level. You can almost feel these people's misery as they embark on a journey they may well not survive. For some it will be the gateway to a new and better life, but as they stand here, on the very edge of Ireland, they have few dreams and little hope.

The Famine Memorial, Dublin

And here is a photo from behind - I felt the sculptor wants us to see them this way, too. They stand facing the sea with their backs to their old lives knowing there can be no return as the cringing dog realises that he will be left behind.

The Famine Memorial, Dublin

Galway
(visited Jul 2016)

Meanwhile, over on the west coast, the city of Galway also has an Oscar Wilde. He shares a seat with his Estonian contemporary and near namesake Eduard Vilde. They never met and as far as I have been able to ascertain, their lives had little else in common. The sculpture was a gift from the people of Estonia when they joined the EU in 2004.

Lynne with Oscar Wilde and Eduard Vilde, Galway
The original (minus Lynne) is in Tartu the 'intellectual capital' of Estonia

United Kingdom

I have a 2013 post entitled Commemorating Comedians in Caerphilly, Morecambe and Ulverston - which I whole-heartedly recommend (well I would, wouldn't I). It consists of statues of four comedians and their background stories. One of them has a plinth, the others would be appropriate here but I don't wish to repeat myself, so please click on the link.

Edinburgh
(Visited July 2021)

Greyfriars Bobbyis by far the oldest work in this post. He has stood patiently, with an ever-shinier nose, atop a substantial plinth since 1873. Only it isn’t really a plinth, it’s a double drinking fountain, people at the top, dogs at the base. As Bobby is a small dog, he needs a plinth or passers-by would trip over him.

Greyfriars Bobby, Edinburgh

Greyfriars Bobby was a Skye Terrier. After his owner died in 1858 the dog kept a vigil at his graveside in the nearby Greyfriars Kirk cemetery, until his own death 14 years later. This demonstrates the heart-warming loyalty of man’s best friend - or perhaps the pathetic neediness of dogs; a self-respecting cat would have raised its tail and stalked away

Burwash, East Sussex
(Visited Sept 2021)

For most of his adult life Rudyard Kipling lived in house called Batemans (currently owned by the National trust and open to the public) just outside the village of Burwash. He now sits in perpetuity on a bench beside the main road through the village.

Lynne and Rudyard Kipling, Burwash

Kipling had the instincts and attitudes of any man of his class born in the latter half of the 19th century. As an unabashed imperialist and the Poet of Empire, he should be out of fashion, but isn’t. He cannot be blamed for the circumstances of his birth, but he should be celebrated for the humanity which shines out of so many of his works. People may argue about his qualities as a poet, but he was undoubtedly one the greatest versifiers in the English language.

Portugal

Loulé
(Visited Oct 2022 and many times previously)

We have been frequent visitors to the Algarve, and for many years Loulé market was our first stop, directly from the airport. In 2006 and 2007 we found the market closed. When it reopened the familiar handsome neo-Classical/Moorish façade fronted a bright, clean and airy new market. Everything was back as it was, only its soul was missing. Revisiting Loulé in 2023 for the first time for several years we found a market trader from the old days, sitting on the steps outside, wondering what had happened to it all.

Bewildered market trader, Loulé

North Macedonia

Stepping lightly from one side of Europe to the other we arrive in a land that was once part of Yugoslavia.

Skopje
(visited May 2015)

Nikola Gruevski (Prime Minister 2006-16) initiated the‘Skopje 2014’ project and ‘Antiquization’. These were exercises in nation-building, promoting a Macedonian identity with unbroken continuity since antiquity and involved, among other things, the building of many large, nationalist statues and memorials. There were two problems. The Macedonia of antiquity, the land of Alexander the Great, was Greek and modern North Macedonians are mostly descended from the Slavic tribes who settled here some 900 year later. Secondly, he spent a great deal of money the city did not have. He resigned after riots in 2016, was subsequently charged with corruption and sentenced to two years in prison. He fled to Hungary and claimed political asylum.

Gruevski’s statues have enormous plinths, but Skopje also has several plinthless statues. A necessary antidote to Gruevski’s bombastic monstrosities, they exemplify a pleasanter and more approachable side of the Macedonian character. The Musicians can be found near ‘Warrior on a Horse’ (under an agreement with the Greeks it is not called ‘Alexander the Great’)

The Musicians, near Macedonia Square, Skopje

While The Divers are on one of the piers of Skopje’s 6th century Stone Bridge. Not great sculpture, perhaps, but it makes you smile, and that is good enough for me.

The Bathers, Stone Bridge, Skopje

Lithuania

Vilnius
(Visited July 2011)

I am always surprised how far east the Baltic States are. Vilnius is actually east of Skopje, but never looks it on a rectangular 2-D map.

After achieving independence from the USSR in 1990 Lithuania had a wealth of statues it no longer wanted, so Lenin and friends were retired to a park near the Belarus border. New statues were raised to various medieval heroes and, in a car park beside an anonymous apartment block in a residential area near the city centre, to Frank Zappa. The bust was erected in 1995 after funds were raised by civil servant Saulius Paukstys. A man blessed with an individual world view and a keen sense of irony, Paukstys commissioned the sculptor of many of the Soviet heroes, to produce the bust. Zappa has no connection with Lithuania, has never visited and before the bust was largely unknown, but the project caught people’s imagination as a wryly ironic gesture in a country that had seen enough of political monuments. (Rough Guide)

Frank Zappa,Vilnius
I know he has a plinth (or column?) but, like Greyfriars Bobby, he would be a trip hazard without it

Armenia

Yerevan
(Visited July 2003)

Mesrop Mashtots (Մեսրոպ Մաշտոց) (362 – 440CE) sits outside the Matenadaran (Մատենադարան) at the top of Mashtots Avenue, one of Yerevan’s main throughfares. The positioning is appropriate, the Matenadaran is a museum and research institute specialising in ancient Armenian manuscripts, and Mashtots is the man credited with inventing the Armenian alphabet (examples above). The (rather weathered) 36 letter alphabet is engraved on the stela to his right.

Mesrop Mashtots, Yerevan

The Fat Cat. I am breaking my own rules here, the plinth is small enough, but the figure is many times life size, but if you are going to portray a Fat Cat it has to be a very large and very fat cat. I hope this is a political statement, but I don't know if fat cat has the same meaning in either the sculptor's native Colombia, or Armenia.

Fat Cat, Yerevan

Georgia

Tbilisi
(visited August 2014)

The Tamada.

Modern Georgia includes the ancient land of Colchis, where Jason and the Argonauts rowed to steal the Golden Fleece.

The myth of the Golden Fleece has historical origins. Many of the streams flowing down from the high Caucasus bear gold, and it was traditional extracted by damming the flow with fleeces so the shiny metal adhered to the sticky untreated wool. This practice may date back to the 3rd millennium BCE, and archaeologists have found huge quantities of golden grave goods, many of which can be seen in the National Museum in Tbilisi. Among them is a seated figure, less than two centimetres tall, holding a drinking horn.

Tamada and us, Tbilisi

The supra (feast) is an essential part of Georgian culture and every supra need a tamada, (toastmaster) who proposes toasts for others to elaborate upon and so keep the wine flowing. Cast in bronze, many times the size of the original, the little fellow has become Tbilisi’s permanent honorary toastmaster. Every visitor to the city poses with him, those small enough sitting on his lap.

China

With a long eastward leap we reach the final country of this post, and two very different cities.

Pingyao
(visited Sept 2014)

600km southwest of Beijing, Pingyao is an old, walled Qing/Ming city, an artfully pickled oasis among the usual Chinese urban sprawl. We visited during the mid-autumn holiday when the town was packed and the Chinese tourist machine was turned up to eleven.

During our perambulation on the city wall we met the night watchmen…

The Night-watchmen, Pingyao city walls

…and the city governor holding a writing brush and about to get down to work. Nothing is taken too seriously here.

The city governor gets down to work, Pingyao

Hangzhou
(visited Nov 2016)

200 km southwest of Shanghai, Hangzhou is the centre of a metropolitan region of over 10m inhabitants. It is the home to Alibaba, one of the world's largest retailers and e-commerce companies and the fifth-largest artificial intelligence company. If Pingyao is China’s past, Hangzhou is its future. Street statues here are not primarily to amuse, though they may make older people smile.

Workers, Hangzhou

For many they are images of a past they do not remember.

Street market, Hangzhou

I have more, but this as probably as much (or more) than most would want at one sitting, so I shall stop. I do like these statues, I like to see who or what the locals wish to commemorate, or how they view their past. Most are not intended to be taken too seriously while one is very serious indeed, but all add to the interest of the towns or cities they call home. And can I have a bonus point for for a post which references Greyfriars Bobby, Frank Zappa and Alexander the Great?

Possibly also of Interest

Statues Without Plinths (2023)
Socialist Realism: In Praise of Bad Art (2022)
The Boxes of Carvoeiro (2016)

Sculptors and Dates of Installation (when known)

Liverpool
Duke of Wellington by George Anderson Lawson, 1865
Havana
El Caballero de Paris by José Ramón Villa Soberón, 2001
Dublin
James Joyce by Marjorie Fitzgibbon, 1990.
Oscar Wilde by Danny Osborne, 1997
Famine Memorial by Rowan Gillespie, 1997
Galway Wilde and Vilde by Tiiu Kirsipuu, 2004
Edinburgh
Greyfriars Bobby by William Brodie, 1873
Burwash
Rudyard Kipling by Victoria Atkinson, 2018
Loulé
Market Trader by Teresa Paulino and Pedro Felix
Vilnius
Frank Zappa by Konstantinas Bagdonas, 1995
Yerevan Mesrop Mastots by Ghukas Chubaryan, 1968
Fat Cat by Fernando Botero
Tbilisi
Tamada by Zurab Tsereteli, 2013